A heated discussion recently went viral across online platforms, following someone asked the question to women: would you rather be lost in a forest with a man or a bear? Similar to the best thought experiments, it exposed vastly opposing worldviews and experiences, illuminated divides among genders, and was likely to induce a deep personal dilemma if you thought about it extensively. There was also the predictable follow-up where men of a certain stripe came online to inform females how foolish they were for choosing the animal and proceeded to describe the consequences they deserved for it. This at least allowed the women who had been hesitating over their choice to make it with renewed assurance.
Dramatising the Setup
To Cook a Bear effectively brings to life this clever little setup. The six-part series is adapted from Scandinavian writer Mikael Niemi’s 2018 novel with the identical title (rendered in 2020 for English readers). It follows the struggles of a clergyman (the lead actor) and his family as they come to start a fresh religious post in Kengis, an isolated settlement in Sweden’s north, in 1852. Within a community with few pleasures, none of the inhabitants especially warm to his puritanical approach to drinking and revelry, yet it is his defense of the poor – particularly the indigenous Sami, from which hails the preacher’s foster child the youth Jussi (Emil Karlsen) – and his conviction in social justice and equal rights that places him on a collision course against the Kengis local authorities.
The Opposing Forces
Soon in cahoots opposing him are the lawman the sheriff Brahe (the performer), the fearsome factory proprietor Madam Sjödahl (the actress), seen initially firing a recently mangled worker with a month’s pay as he remains babbling at the sight his crushed hand, and all others who profit from a community who can be bought with some containers of the whisky provided by the creepy store owner the merchant Lindmark (the actor). Although, to be fair, Lindmark’s eeriness diminishes when travelling artist the artist Beronius arrives in the story (Simon J Berger, providing an acting turn of rare discomfiting power). If they are – like the pastor himself – just slightly beyond being stereotypes, they are at least potent archetypes.
Narrative Development
With the seeds of conflict planted, the moment arrives to get down with the storyline. The maid from the doctor’s house, Hilda (the actress), accordingly goes missing in the forest. Indications of her flight and bear markings upon a trunk are found but she is nowhere to be seen. Rumours and anxieties regarding a human-devouring bear roaming the woods spread, yet the clergyman has another theory that he and Jussi embark to verify.
An Odd Beast
To Cook a Bear is a slightly odd beast. It creates a fine sense of the bleakness that lets distrust and prejudice and grim legends flourish from the native legend that bears might be dominated or possessed by the spirits of humans. It avoids romanticise the tough existence led by the residents, in which violence, be it from the wild or people, always looms at the periphery, waiting to erupt. But the characters rarely become more than ciphers – or maybe, while the conflicts amid fairness and vengeance, logic and religion, virtue and wickedness intensify, representative characters within a moral tale – preventing the whole thing fully coming to life.
Stylistic Shifts
And then, exist numerous tonally jarring instances where the pastor’s ability to discover clues and determine Hilda’s fate becomes nearly laughable. He positions himself observing broken milk pots and clumps of hair within storage sheds as a fusion of Hercule Poirot and Sherlock Holmes – alongside Jussi a rather hapless Hastings-cum-Watson (neither of whom had to taste a blend of blood droplets and the boss’s spit to confirm that, yes, it was clearly coagulated blood on the site), prior to declaring his newest conclusion and extracting a body from a bog.
Clashing Agendas
The village elite are determined proving that Hilda met her end by a bear, perhaps to preserve the calm, perhaps to shield one of their own. The pastor is intent on establishing otherwise, and the evidence so rapidly stacks up supporting his view that once more the show’s credibility and audience tolerance get strained. In its finest moments, To Cook a Bear is reminiscent of the adaptation a few years ago of Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent, with its evocation of the competing attractions and fears presented by rational thought and belief. In its low points, it resembles a bear-themed police procedural. Still, it appears to provide the response to the earlier query: “Ladies, take the bear.”
The series streams on Disney+ now.
